OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Riemannian Optimization for Active Mapping with Robot Teams
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2024
Year: 2024

Autonomous exploration of unknown environments using a team of mobile robots demands distributed perception and planning strategies to enable efficient and scalable performance. Ideally, each robot should update its map and plan its motion not only relying on its own observations, but also considering the observations of its peers. Centralized solutions to multi-robot coordination are susceptible to central node failure and require a sophisticated communication infrastructure for reliable operation. Current decentralized active mapping methods consider simplistic robot models with linear-Gaussian observations and Euclidean robot states. In this work, we present a distributed multi-robot mapping and planning method, called Riemannian Optimization for Active Mapping (ROAM). We formulate an optimization problem over a graph with node variables belonging to a Riemannian manifold and a consensus constraint requiring feasible solutions to agree on the node variables. We develop a distributed Riemannian optimization algorithm that relies only on one-hop communication to solve the problem with consensus and optimality guarantees. We show that multi-robot active mapping can be achieved via two applications of our distributed Riemannian optimization over different manifolds: distributed estimation of a 3-D semantic map and distributed planning of SE(3) trajectories that minimize map uncertainty. We demonstrate the performance of ROAM in simulation and real-world experiments using a team of robots with RGB-D cameras.
Additive Spanner Lower Bounds with Optimal Inner Graph Structure
Venue: arXiv cs.DS 2024
Year: 2024

We construct $n$-node graphs on which any $O(n)$-size spanner has additive error at least $+Ω(n^{3/17})$, improving on the previous best lower bound of $Ω(n^{1/7})$ [Bodwin-Hoppenworth FOCS '22]. Our construction completes the first two steps of a particular three-step research program, introduced in prior work and overviewed here, aimed at producing tight bounds for the problem by aligning aspects of the upper and lower bound constructions. More specifically, we develop techniques that enable the use of inner graphs in the lower bound framework whose technical properties are provably tight with the corresponding assumptions made in the upper bounds. As an additional application of our techniques, we improve the corresponding lower bound for $O(n)$-size additive emulators to $+Ω(n^{1/14})$.
Post-hoc and manifold explanations analysis of facial expression data based on deep learning
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

The complex information processing system of humans generates a lot of objective and subjective evaluations, making the exploration of human cognitive products of great cutting-edge theoretical value. In recent years, deep learning technologies, which are inspired by biological brain mechanisms, have made significant strides in the application of psychological or cognitive scientific research, particularly in the memorization and recognition of facial data. This paper investigates through experimental research how neural networks process and store facial expression data and associate these data with a range of psychological attributes produced by humans. Researchers utilized deep learning model VGG16, demonstrating that neural networks can learn and reproduce key features of facial data, thereby storing image memories. Moreover, the experimental results reveal the potential of deep learning models in understanding human emotions and cognitive processes and establish a manifold visualization interpretation of cognitive products or psychological attributes from a non-Euclidean space perspective, offering new insights into enhancing the explainability of AI. This study not only advances the application of AI technology in the field of psychology but also provides a new psychological theoretical understanding the information processing of the AI. The code is available in here: https://github.com/NKUShaw/Psychoinformatics.
FEDQ-Trust: Efficient Data-Driven Trust Prediction for Mobile Edge-Based IoT Systems
Venue: arXiv cs.DC 2024
Year: 2024

We introduce FEDQ-Trust, an innovative data-driven trust prediction approach designed for mobile edge-based Internet of Things (IoT) environments. The decentralized nature of mobile edge environments introduces challenges due to variations in data distribution, impacting the accuracy and training efficiency of existing distributed data-driven trust prediction models. FEDQ-Trust effectively tackles the statistical heterogeneity challenges by integrating Federated Expectation-Maximization with Deep Q Networks. Federated Expectation-Maximization's robust handling of statistical heterogeneity significantly enhances trust prediction accuracy. Meanwhile, Deep Q Networks streamlines the model training process, efficiently reducing the number of training clients while maintaining model performance. We conducted a suite of experiments within simulated MEC-based IoT settings by leveraging two real-world IoT datasets. The experimental results demonstrate that our model achieved a significant convergence time reduction of 97% to 99% while ensuring a notable improvement of 8% to 14% in accuracy compared to state-of-the-art models.
Field Notes on Deploying Research Robots in Public Spaces
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2024
Year: 2024

Human-robot interaction requires to be studied in the wild. In the summers of 2022 and 2023, we deployed two trash barrel service robots through the wizard-of-oz protocol in public spaces to study human-robot interactions in urban settings. We deployed the robots at two different public plazas in downtown Manhattan and Brooklyn for a collective of 20 hours of field time. To date, relatively few long-term human-robot interaction studies have been conducted in shared public spaces. To support researchers aiming to fill this gap, we would like to share some of our insights and learned lessons that would benefit both researchers and practitioners on how to deploy robots in public spaces. We share best practices and lessons learned with the HRI research community to encourage more in-the-wild research of robots in public spaces and call for the community to share their lessons learned to a GitHub repository.
Equivalence: An analysis of artists' roles with Image Generative AI from Conceptual Art perspective through an interactive installation design practice
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2024
Year: 2024

Over the past year, the emergence of advanced text-to-image Generative AI models has significantly impacted the art world, challenging traditional notions of creativity and the role of artists. This study explores how artists interact with these technologies, using a 5P model (Purpose, People, Process, Product, and Press) based on Rhodes' creativity framework to compare the artistic processes behind Conceptual Art and Image Generative AI. To exemplify this framework, a practical case study titled "Equivalence", a multi-screen interactive installation that converts users' speech input into continuously evolving paintings developed based on Stable Diffusion and NLP algorithms, was developed. Through comprehensive analysis and the case study, this work aims to broaden our understanding of artists' roles and foster a deeper appreciation for the creative aspects inherent in artwork created with Image Generative AI.
Mesh-based Photorealistic and Real-time 3D Mapping for Robust Visual Perception of Autonomous Underwater Vehicle
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2024
Year: 2024

This paper proposes a photorealistic real-time dense 3D mapping system that utilizes a learning-based image enhancement method and mesh-based map representation. Due to the characteristics of the underwater environment, where problems such as hazing and low contrast occur, it is hard to apply conventional simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) methods. Furthermore, for sensitive tasks like inspecting cracks, photorealistic mapping is very important. However, the behavior of Autonomous Underwater Vehicle (AUV) is computationally constrained. In this paper, we utilize a neural network-based image enhancement method to improve pose estimation and mapping quality and apply a sliding window-based mesh expansion method to enable lightweight, fast, and photorealistic mapping. To validate our results, we utilize real-world and indoor synthetic datasets. We performed qualitative validation with the real-world dataset and quantitative validation by modeling images from the indoor synthetic dataset as underwater scenes.
Domain Reasoning in TopKAT
Venue: arXiv cs.PL 2024
Year: 2024

TopKAT is the algebraic theory of Kleene algebra with tests (KAT) extended with a top element. Compared to KAT, one pleasant feature of TopKAT is that, in relational models, the top element allows us to express the domain and codomain of a relation. This enables several applications in program logics, such as proving under-approximate specifications or reachability properties of imperative programs. However, while TopKAT inherits many pleasant features of KATs, such as having a decidable equational theory, it is incomplete with respect to relational models. In other words, there are properties that hold true of all relational TopKATs but cannot be proved with the axioms of TopKAT. This issue is potentially worrisome for program-logic applications, in which relational models play a key role. In this paper, we further investigate the completeness properties of TopKAT with respect to relational models. We show that TopKAT is complete with respect to (co)domain comparison of KAT terms, but incomplete when comparing the (co)domain of arbitrary TopKAT terms. Since the encoding of under-approximate specifications in TopKAT hinges on this type of formula, the aforementioned incompleteness results have a limited impact when using TopKAT to reason about such specifications.
A family of self-orthogonal divisible codes with locality 2
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2024
Year: 2024

Linear codes are widely studied due to their applications in communication, cryptography, quantum codes, distributed storage and many other fields. In this paper, we use the trace and norm functions over finite fields to construct a family of linear codes. The weight distributions of the codes are determined in three cases via Gaussian sums. The codes are shown to be self-orthogonal divisible codes with only three, four or five nonzero weights in these cases. In particular, we prove that this family of linear codes has locality 2. Several optimal or almost optimal linear codes and locally recoverable codes are derived. In particular, an infinite family of distance-optimal binary linear codes with respect to the sphere-packing bound is obtained. The self-orthogonal codes derived in this paper can be used to construct lattices and have nice application in distributed storage.
Two classes of constacyclic codes with a square-root-like lower bound
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2024
Year: 2024

Constacyclic codes over finite fields are an important class of linear codes as they contain distance-optimal codes and linear codes with best known parameters. They are interesting in theory and practice, as they have the constacyclic structure. In this paper, an infinite class of $q$-ary negacyclic codes of length $(q^m-1)/2$ and an infinite class of $q$-ary constacyclic codes of length $(q^m-1)/(q-1)$ are constructed and analyzed. As a by-product, two infinite classes of ternary negacyclic self-dual codes with a square-root-like lower bound on their minimum distances are presented.
Towards Long-term Robotics in the Wild
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2024
Year: 2024

In this paper, we emphasise the critical importance of large-scale datasets for advancing field robotics capabilities, particularly in natural environments. While numerous datasets exist for urban and suburban settings, those tailored to natural environments are scarce. Our recent benchmarks WildPlaces and WildScenes address this gap by providing synchronised image, lidar, semantic and accurate 6-DoF pose information in forest-type environments. We highlight the multi-modal nature of this dataset and discuss and demonstrate its utility in various downstream tasks, such as place recognition and 2D and 3D semantic segmentation tasks.
Scalable Event-by-event Processing of Neuromorphic Sensory Signals With Deep State-Space Models
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

Event-based sensors are well suited for real-time processing due to their fast response times and encoding of the sensory data as successive temporal differences. These and other valuable properties, such as a high dynamic range, are suppressed when the data is converted to a frame-based format. However, most current methods either collapse events into frames or cannot scale up when processing the event data directly event-by-event. In this work, we address the key challenges of scaling up event-by-event modeling of the long event streams emitted by such sensors, which is a particularly relevant problem for neuromorphic computing. While prior methods can process up to a few thousand time steps, our model, based on modern recurrent deep state-space models, scales to event streams of millions of events for both training and inference. We leverage their stable parameterization for learning long-range dependencies, parallelizability along the sequence dimension, and their ability to integrate asynchronous events effectively to scale them up to long event streams. We further augment these with novel event-centric techniques enabling our model to match or beat the state-of-the-art performance on several event stream benchmarks. In the Spiking Speech Commands task, we improve state-of-the-art by a large margin of 7.7% to 88.4%. On the DVS128-Gestures dataset, we achieve competitive results without using frames or convolutional neural networks. Our work demonstrates, for the first time, that it is possible to use fully event-based processing with purely recurrent networks to achieve state-of-the-art task performance in several event-based benchmarks.
Explainability of machine learning approaches in forensic linguistics: a case study in geolinguistic authorship profiling
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

Forensic authorship profiling uses linguistic markers to infer characteristics about an author of a text. This task is paralleled in dialect classification, where a prediction is made about the linguistic variety of a text based on the text itself. While there have been significant advances in recent years in variety classification, forensic linguistics rarely relies on these approaches due to their lack of transparency, among other reasons. In this paper we therefore explore the explainability of machine learning approaches considering the forensic context. We focus on variety classification as a means of geolinguistic profiling of unknown texts based on social media data from the German-speaking area. For this, we identify the lexical items that are the most impactful for the variety classification. We find that the extracted lexical features are indeed representative of their respective varieties and note that the trained models also rely on place names for classifications.
An Agile Formal Specification Language Design Based on K Framework
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2024
Year: 2024

Formal Methods (FMs) are currently essential for verifying the safety and reliability of software systems. However, the specification writing in formal methods tends to be complex and challenging to learn, requiring familiarity with various intricate formal specification languages and verification technologies. In response to the increasing complexity of software frameworks, existing specification writing methods fall short in meeting agility requirements. To address this, this paper introduces an Agile Formal Specification Language (ASL). The ASL is defined based on the K Framework and YAML Ain't Markup Language (YAML). The design of ASL incorporates agile design principles, making the writing of formal specifications simpler, more efficient, and scalable. Additionally, a specification translation algorithm is developed, capable of converting ASL into K formal specification language that can be executed for verification. Experimental evaluations demonstrate that the proposed method significantly reduces the code size needed for specification writing, enhancing agility in formal specification writing.
On the Impact of Data Heterogeneity in Federated Learning Environments with Application to Healthcare Networks
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

Federated Learning (FL) allows multiple privacy-sensitive applications to leverage their dataset for a global model construction without any disclosure of the information. One of those domains is healthcare, where groups of silos collaborate in order to generate a global predictor with improved accuracy and generalization. However, the inherent challenge lies in the high heterogeneity of medical data, necessitating sophisticated techniques for assessment and compensation. This paper presents a comprehensive exploration of the mathematical formalization and taxonomy of heterogeneity within FL environments, focusing on the intricacies of medical data. In particular, we address the evaluation and comparison of the most popular FL algorithms with respect to their ability to cope with quantity-based, feature and label distribution-based heterogeneity. The goal is to provide a quantitative evaluation of the impact of data heterogeneity in FL systems for healthcare networks as well as a guideline on FL algorithm selection. Our research extends beyond existing studies by benchmarking seven of the most common FL algorithms against the unique challenges posed by medical data use cases. The paper targets the prediction of the risk of stroke recurrence through a set of tabular clinical reports collected by different federated hospital silos: data heterogeneity frequently encountered in this scenario and its impact on FL performance are discussed.
Solving Partial Differential Equations with Equivariant Extreme Learning Machines
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

We utilize extreme-learning machines for the prediction of partial differential equations (PDEs). Our method splits the state space into multiple windows that are predicted individually using a single model. Despite requiring only few data points (in some cases, our method can learn from a single full-state snapshot), it still achieves high accuracy and can predict the flow of PDEs over long time horizons. Moreover, we show how additional symmetries can be exploited to increase sample efficiency and to enforce equivariance.
Time Series Data Augmentation as an Imbalanced Learning Problem
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

Recent state-of-the-art forecasting methods are trained on collections of time series. These methods, often referred to as global models, can capture common patterns in different time series to improve their generalization performance. However, they require large amounts of data that might not be readily available. Besides this, global models sometimes fail to capture relevant patterns unique to a particular time series. In these cases, data augmentation can be useful to increase the sample size of time series datasets. The main contribution of this work is a novel method for generating univariate time series synthetic samples. Our approach stems from the insight that the observations concerning a particular time series of interest represent only a small fraction of all observations. In this context, we frame the problem of training a forecasting model as an imbalanced learning task. Oversampling strategies are popular approaches used to deal with the imbalance problem in machine learning. We use these techniques to create synthetic time series observations and improve the accuracy of forecasting models. We carried out experiments using 7 different databases that contain a total of 5502 univariate time series. We found that the proposed solution outperforms both a global and a local model, thus providing a better trade-off between these two approaches.
Machine Learning for Windows Malware Detection and Classification: Methods, Challenges and Ongoing Research
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2024
Year: 2024

In this chapter, readers will explore how machine learning has been applied to build malware detection systems designed for the Windows operating system. This chapter starts by introducing the main components of a Machine Learning pipeline, highlighting the challenges of collecting and maintaining up-to-date datasets. Following this introduction, various state-of-the-art malware detectors are presented, encompassing both feature-based and deep learning-based detectors. Subsequent sections introduce the primary challenges encountered by machine learning-based malware detectors, including concept drift and adversarial attacks. Lastly, this chapter concludes by providing a brief overview of the ongoing research on adversarial defenses.
OAEI Machine Learning Dataset for Online Model Generation
Venue: arXiv cs.IR 2024
Year: 2024

Ontology and knowledge graph matching systems are evaluated annually by the Ontology Alignment Evaluation Initiative (OAEI). More and more systems use machine learning-based approaches, including large language models. The training and validation datasets are usually determined by the system developer and often a subset of the reference alignments are used. This sampling is against the OAEI rules and makes a fair comparison impossible. Furthermore, those models are trained offline (a trained and optimized model is packaged into the matcher) and therefore the systems are specifically trained for those tasks. In this paper, we introduce a dataset that contains training, validation, and test sets for most of the OAEI tracks. Thus, online model learning (the systems must adapt to the given input alignment without human intervention) is made possible to enable a fair comparison for ML-based systems. We showcase the usefulness of the dataset by fine-tuning the confidence thresholds of popular systems.
IncidentResponseGPT: Generating Traffic Incident Response Plans with Generative Artificial Intelligence
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

The proposed IncidentResponseGPT framework - a novel system that applies generative artificial intelligence (AI) to potentially enhance the efficiency and effectiveness of traffic incident response. This model allows for synthesis of region-specific incident response guidelines and generates incident response plans adapted to specific area, aiming to expedite decision-making for traffic management authorities. This approach aims to accelerate incident resolution times by suggesting various recommendations (e.g. optimal rerouting strategies, estimating resource needs) to minimize the overall impact on the urban traffic network. The system suggests specific actions, including dynamic lane closures, optimized rerouting and dispatching appropriate emergency resources. We utilize the Technique for Order Preference by Similarity to Ideal Solution (TOPSIS) to rank generated response plans based on criteria like impact minimization and resource efficiency based on their proximity to an human-proposed solution.